Nov 20 Here comes the Escapism.

"Box-office receipts point to a popular cinema positioned within ideology precisely through its commitment to pleasure and entertainment."

Escapist genre films "provided the most effective framework for accommodating various social groups and for catering precisely to the specialized interests and sensibilities that allegedly had been dissolved into the unifying concepts of nation and race.

While the openly political films constituted the viewing subject in collective terms and addressed the audience as a unified body, the genre films participated in the illusory validation of difference: between social and individual norms, public and private behavior, gender roles and class difference...

Films addressed audiences through a model of identification - often associated with the ideology of populism or, to use the Nazi term, Volkstümlichkeit - that allowed them to participate, though only symbolically, in the creation of a unified, imaginary subject with specific ambitions and desires.

That this subject can be described as petty bourgeois has a lot to do with the petty-bourgeois origins of the Nazi movement and its exploitation both of economic fears in the impoverished middle class and of fantasies of social ascent among members of the working class and lower-middle class."